Last Thursday I was struck by a video of a woman dancing in the O.R. The Huffington Post lifestyle editor called it awesome. “Deb’s Flash Mob” lasts 6 minutes and 14 seconds. The scene takes place in an ordinary-appearing operating room. The song, Get Me Bodied, by Beyoncé, beats familiarly, throughout. And flash mobs, well, they’ve happened in all kinds of places.

What I’d never seen before – what’s news – is a furiously lively woman dancing with doctors, nurses and other others in the operating suite where she would soon undergo a bilateral mastectomy. She, the patient, is shaking and grooving. She’s clad in two hospital gowns, one flipped backwards (for modesty; a trick those of us who’ve been there know), a cap and hospital ID bracelets. An IV part dangles from the crook of one arm. Despite the circumstances, it looks like Deb’s having fun, smiling and, in the end – as her surgery nears, she’s thanking and hugging people who appear to be her friends, dressed in scrubs and adorned with health care accessories like stethoscopes.

As of this post, Deb’s OR Flash Mob has been viewed over 6.3 million times on YouTube. Not everyone, including a breast cancer patient and blogger I respect, loved the clip. (And I must admit it gets a bit long; at 3 minutes in, I was ready to concentrate, again, on what I’d been writing.) There are a hundred things wrong with this video, not the least of which is that if every patient were to ask for a dance party before surgery, the hospitals would lose money and (more importantly) precious operating room time. It’s a completely unreasonable, and, maybe, selfish thing to do.

But the dance party is humanizing. I’d go so far as to suggest it adds value to the Deb’s health care experience, and, remotely, might make a good outcome more likely. Why’s that? Because if the nurses and doctors, including the anesthesiologists who take care of the patient during surgery are reminded of her personality – her spirit, or spark, or whatever you want to call it – before they start monitoring and cutting, they are more likely to pay attention, to take care of her body, of which she’s relinquished control, than if they simply perceive her as a physical human container of a tumor with flesh, bones, a beating heart, lungs and other organs.

It turns out the patient is a physician, Dr. Deborah Cohan. She’s an obstetrician and AIDS researcher at UCSF. I can only infer that her position was a factor in the medical center’s indulging her request for a dance party before her mastectomy. On a Caring Bridge site, she offers few details of her circumstances. What all of us who’ve been there, after that kind of surgery, know is that the recovery isn’t always easy. Drains and all that. The dance party was a week ago tomorrow, early in the morning before the bilateral mastectomies. I hope that the patient is recovering well.

What Deb did, and I thank her for this, is offer an extreme example of patient-centered care. Among other things, she did everything possible to assure that the people caring for her perceive her as a human being who dances and enjoys music.

In reality, many and probably most breast cancer (and other) patients can barely get their legitimate questions answered about their surgery or treatment options, or have sufficient time with doctors to discuss those thoroughly. If only every doctor would “see” each patient as a vibrant human, that might help. Each of us deserves a dance party equivalent, or at least a good conversation and attention from the people we trust with our medical care.

“If you don’t know about cancer, when it comes back it comes back hard.” It’s “meaner and stronger,” he explains. To compensate for its added aggressiveness, doctors raise doses of chemo and radiation. That’s not easy for anyone, a child no less.

He reflects on his daughter’s condition back then: “So she’s bald, which she doesn’t mind because every kid in the ward is bald, and she thinks it’s a part of life…”

He recalls his predicament, as a parent: “You’re not prepared for this. There’s no books, there’s no home-ed class to teach you,” he says. Therapists were off-limits in his community. “So you try to figure it out.”

“What did I do?” he wondered, trying to make sense of his daughter’s illness. His musings cross all kinds of barriers.

Griffith was thrilled to appear several times on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show. But NBC is “all about nice and everything is going to be OK.” He felt pressured to keep everything “light” when he wanted to speak honestly.

He recounts how he felt. “And I’m hurting, and I want everyone else to hurt because somebody is to blame for this,” he shouts, two decades later. He suppressed his anger, bucked up, and performed.

Rage persists, understandably, still.

The powerful clip is produced by the Moth, an NPO dedicated to storytelling. H/t to Jen Singer.

Thank you to Mr. Griffith, the comedian and actor, for telling it like it is.

There’s a music video, Don’t Touch Me that’s annoying but depressingly right on how some women feel in menopause – a frequent and under-discussed aspect of chemo or hormonal therapy for BC, followed by a grounded and unusually frank discussion about what happens to women after cancer treatment, menopause and sex.

Brenda’s right; none of this was included in my med school curriculum or oncology fellowship. Although, in fairness and quite seriously, this was a subject on mine and some other oncologists’ radar long ago. Cancer treatments can have lasting effects on sexuality in men and women.

In a typical PBL, the students meet regularly in small groups. On Monday they begin with clinical aspects of a case. The process involves finding information and researching relevant topics to “solve” the diagnosis and /or a treatment dilemma. Over the course of each week the students move forward, working through a hypothetical patient’s history, physical exam and lab studies to the nitty-gritty of molecules, genes and cells implicated in a disease process.

It’s a lot of fun, usually.

The video was uploaded in February, 2007. It’s attributed to a group of med students at the University of Pittsburgh, class of 2009.

Med-blog grand rounds this week is hosted by e-patient Dave, who is Dave deBronkart, a real man who was diagnosed with a renal cell (kidney) cancer a few years back. He’s a terrific speaker and an Internet friend.

By coincidence I was searching for the definition of an e-patient, and came upon it there, in a video of his presentation at the TED (for those of you in the 1990s, that would be Technology, Entertainment, Design ideas worth spreading) “x” – meaning independently-organized meeting held in Maastricht a few weeks ago. Dave and others spoke on the topic of “The Year of Patients Rising.”

Since Watson won on Jeopardy, there’s been lots of talk of robots assuming doctors’ roles. Ten years into our future, machines with programmed empathy and nuanced diagnostic skills will solve diagnostic dilemmas, deduce optimal treatment and make us well.

Dr. Charles cites a 2006 Mayo Clinic Proceedings review on what patients say are essential characteristics of a good physician: The ideal doctor isconfident, empathetic, humane, personal, forthright, respectful, and thorough. In this clever, short movie crafted by Dr. Charles, the robot-doctor tries to demonstrate his capability in each of these dimensions in his interaction with a cartoon patient.

I hope the folks over at IBM, who are collaborating with real medical centers now about designing artificial doctors’ intelligence, might take a close look at this video.

The clip is said, on YouTube, to be a 1949 commercial for Camel cigarettes. I tried to find more on this, first by clicking on the Camel website, sponsored by the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, but the virtual age filter checkpoints asked me for too much information, so I gave up.

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Note: Using Google translator, I initially found that longarts means “lung” in Dutch. Zwolle is a city north and east of Amsterdam. But @longartszwolle clarified via Twitter: longarts means pulmonologist. – updated by ES, 2/4/11, 9AM.